Monday, 30 July 2018

Over the weekend, the Telegraph published an retch-inducing obsequious puff piece on Jamie Oliver which - inadvertently, I reckon - gave an astonishing insight into the dictatorial mind of the sanctimonious snob. It's behind a paywall but here are some hideous lowlights.

The night before I’m due to meet Jamie Oliver there are whispers from his headquarters of a big announcement. ‘All will become clear!’ they say. The next morning, news duly breaks that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, will ban junk-food advertising on the capital’s Tube and bus network, as well as the opening of hot-food takeaway shops within 400 metres of schools – the culmination of 28 months of close collaboration between Oliver and Khan.

‘It’s a mega day,’ Oliver tells me at Jamie HQ

He is happy, apparently, because a clueless attention-seeking Mayor has proposed a pointless ban on advertising - which will have no effect whatsoever except to kill advertising revenue and reinforce the idea of censorship while reducing public choice - and stated that he is intending to all but eradicate new takeaways in the capital unless they are to open in a park or the river Thames, as you can see by clicking to enlarge the graphic below.

It won't surprise you to learn that evidence to date - you know, that evidence thing that politicians like to pretend they look into - shows that all this will do diddley-squat for obesity rates in London.

Mega, huh?

No care for the businesses which will be affected and no care for the choices that he - in his misplaced ignorance - is depriving the rest of the public. Still, it makes his multi-millionaireship happy, so screw everyone else, eh?

But, incredibly, that isn't the astonishing bit. How about this?

‘I’ve been through five prime ministers. Mr Blair was the first person to admit that the state was responsible for children’s health between the ages of four and 16.

The state is responsible for children's health? Not parents? Can you think of anything more repugnant than that? Well, fear not because Jamie can.

The state was doing nothing about how this group are fed, while being right on the case of dog food.’

Did he just compare other people's children with dogs? Or was he comparing a Big Mac with a can of Pedigree Chum? Sometimes you just can't tell with obsessed hysterical extremists, can you?

Anyway, let's crack on.

He’s been accused of being the ‘fun police’, running a ‘nanny state initiative that penalises poor people’, of endangering the revenue of advertising agencies, being hypocritical, upsetting American mothers, and failing to understand what it is to be poor and unable to afford healthier food.

All of which is true, I'd say, apart from the affording healthier food. Healthy food is far cheaper than less healthy alternatives, but hard-working people (who are not paid to be in the kitchen throwing together recipes with ingredients they just have lying around the house like Jamie) make a trade-off with the time they have available. It's the time they can't afford, not a 45p cucumber.

‘Yes,’ says Oliver. ‘I don’t like [the criticism]. I got my arse kicked left, right and centre for 10 years. It makes me feel sick, but defending my position is more important. On the whole,’ he adds with some irony, ‘all of the people I care about most – obese children and their parents – are the ones who don’t like me.’

Well maybe that's a hint, Jamie old boy, that they'd prefer you to leave them alone to make their own choices. Reason being I think they know more about what's best for their families than you fucking do.

Why don’t you just sell the lot and become an MP and continue your fight in Parliament? The suggestion seems genuinely to shock him; indeed, he stops talking for at least three seconds. ‘But you wouldn’t want me in Parliament,’ he says eventually. ‘I’ve done nothing clever in 15 years,’ he says. ‘It’s all common sense. All I’ve done is create conversations that newspapers report on. Having my own children changed me. It made me realise that those annoying kids down the street were someone’s children, and so they mattered.

I think the operative words there, Jamie, are "someone's children" as in not yours.

Childhood obesity is the first thing and the last thing I think about every day, which isn’t normal.’

No it's not, it is obsessive and you should seek help for your addiction to snobbery and bossing people around.

However, the most stunning part in the entire article has to be this.

Oliver’s obesity campaign faltered when Theresa May’s 2016 legislation (Chapter One) included a tax on sugar content in drinks but nothing about restrictions on junk-food advertising. ‘It’s absolute bollocks that parents are totally to blame for childhood obesity; incompetent legislation is to blame.’

Let's turn that round a tad. If parents are not to blame, he must be saying - in his knuckle-dragging way - that they are not to be judged responsible for what their kids eat. That, instead, the state should usurp parental choices and - as Oliver's daft policies show - dictate the food supply without even a nod to evidence, practicality, efficacy or financial reality. Nope, just feels.

For Oliver to say - with a straight, albeit slack-jawed fat-tongued, face - that the state is responsible for what kids eat, and not parents, is incredibly sinister. Once it is accepted that the state can involve itself in something as fundamentally private to families as what parents feed their children - in fact that it has more of a role than parents themselves - we are almost through looking glass.

I mean, Christ, give them that kind of power over parental choice and politicians will want to name kids next!

Tuesday, 24 July 2018

The NNA spotted a superb statistic on Friday at the government's Tobacco Control Debate. I don't know about you but I think this deserves more attention.

Yesterday in a debate on the government’s Tobacco Control Plan in the House of Commons, Sir Kevin Barron highlighted the gulf between the UK and Ireland, two countries with identical traditional tobacco control policies but with differing approaches to e-cigarettes. Between 2012 and 2016 smoking dropped by nearly a quarter in the UK . In Ireland, where e-cigarettes are viewed with suspicion, the smoking rate actually went up in this period.

I want to give a comparator and to refer back to my intervention on the Minister. I chaired the Health Committee in 2005, after we had fought an election on a manifesto commitment by the Labour party to introduce a ban on smoking in public places. I stood on that manifesto, but the ban proposed was not a comprehensive one. The Health Committee, of which I became the Chair, investigated smoking in public places. We went to Ireland to take evidence, because it had had such a ban for about two years.

I will now demonstrate the effectiveness of e-cigarettes by comparing smoking rates in the UK versus those in Ireland, where every other approach to tobacco control is identical to those in the UK, such as plain packaging, retail display bans and marketing promotions all stopped. In recent years in the UK, smoking rates have dropped by almost a quarter—according to the Office for National Statistics, 24.4% of UK adults smoked in 2012 and 15.8% in 2016—and the UK now has the second lowest smoking rate in Europe. In Ireland, which has exactly the same tobacco control as we put through this place over many years, smoking rates have stagnated: 23% of adults smoked in 2015 and 2016, dropping to 22% in 2017, according to Healthy Ireland stats. That shows how the use of e-cigarettes has been good in reducing smoking in this country.

As the NNA has shown with their links, Hansard and Barron are actually wrong here. In Ireland the rate was reported as 22% in 2012 (chapter 3) and 23% in 2016. Maybe Barron was confused himself, perhaps it didn't compute. But both figures are derived from the same source, Tobacco Free Ireland.

But whether it is down by 1% or up by 1% matters not, this is a real life experiment which is just about perfect. In the UK smoking rates have nosedived, while in Ireland they have barely shifted. In the UK we have a supportive environment to e-cigs, in Ireland high profile politicians are doing everything in their power to turn smokers away from them.

We are not comparing the UK with a country with vastly differing levels of disposable income here, far from it. Ireland is a country on a par with the UK as far as the economy goes.

What's more, we're not comparing with Africans, south east Asians, Indians, Scandinavians, Americans north or south or antipodeans. We are comparing with our nearest cultural neighbours, so closely aligned are we that we don't even enforce passport requirements between the two countries.

The British and the Irish are about as good a comparison for ecological purposes as there can possibly be.

And, as Barron said, the only difference between UK policy and Irish policy is that over here our government cautiously welcomes new nicotine products whereas in Ireland they don't.

As I mentioned only yesterday, if politicians really want to get smokers to quit smoking - because that is really what they want, isn't it - this should be compelling stuff.

For a political class who consistently say they always wish to act on evidence, this is about the best quality evidence they can get. A population-level, real life study of two almost identical countries - with just the one difference in nicotine policy - but with vastly differing outcomes.

So why are other countries not scrambling to emulate the indisputable success of promoting safer alternatives to smoking that this inadvertent experiment proves? Well, I guess it also shows that the other tobacco control policies legislated for in that timescale - of which there have been many - are completely and utterly pointless. And I suppose there is always the fear that if smokers actually did what politicians pretend they want to see, tobacco tax receipts would also plummet, and they are fully aware that the economically fraudulent propaganda tobacco controllers spout about smoking harming the economy is utter bollocks.

So bravo to Barron for highlighting such a stark comparator in the House of Commons chamber. You just have to wonder why the tobacco control industry and other politicians, both sides of the Irish Sea, have been so silent about it, whereas if the results were the other way round they would be screaming it from the rooftops.

Monday, 23 July 2018

Via Eric Crampton, we are seeing yet more evidence of how vaping has utterly confused policymakers all over the world.

E-cigs and other risk reduced nicotine products are - quite rightly - described as a 'disruptive' technology. Of course, the traditional use of that term generally means that it is disruptive to the current market, but considering the current market is dried tobacco leaves in paper tubes that governments tend to dislike, you'd think they'd be happy about that.

Well, in many jurisdictions it appears not, and if you look closely you can see why. As Crampton points out, the NZ Ministry of Health's latest Health and Independence Report is optimistic about e-cigs but it is worth noting that this is only because they were made de facto legal by a court case brought by the makers of iQos. All of a sudden, vaping was legal too. And with that judgement has come some very irritating problems if you are a government set in its ways and who only had dried leaves in a paper tube to regulate before.

1 There remain interesting conflict of laws problems around plain packaging rules and the Fair Trading Act. Plain packaging rules for tobacco products would include heated tobacco, including Iqos. And, in theory, would also cover any nicotine derived from tobacco for vaping too. But putting the big smoking warnings on packages of products that are not smoked could be considered illegal under the Fair Trading Act's prohibitions around false representations and misleading conduct.

I emailed MBIE asking about this, and they punted to ComCom. When I asked ComCom, they said that they cannot vet specific advertising or business practices for any company - and that companies would have to seek independent legal advice. So it is legal to sell vaping products - but if MoH believes the nicotine to be tobacco derived, it might consider it to be subject to the plain packaging rules. And it might be illegal to put those plain packaging warnings on the packages. But the government will not tell you. Seems pretty dumb. And it's an odd kind of dumb - companies that are cagey about how their nicotine is derived are probably ok, but ones that publicly state that their nicotine is derived from tobacco may not be.

2 MoH is of the view that the Iqos decision does not apply to snus. Snus has seemed rather important in getting people away from smoked tobacco in Sweden. Why they want this to still be illegal - I don't get it. I expect that if they ever sued NZ Snus for selling the stuff, that the prohibition could easily be deemed inconsistent with the purposes of the Act.

3 Excise rates on non-combusted tobacco for reduced harm devices remain unjustifiably high. This doesn't affect vaping, which is not subject to excise (phew!), but would be a problem for other products. And what about the display bans and bans on advertising less harmful alternatives?

All very complicated, isn't it? Where did that golden age go where the NZ government could just nod through ineffective policies from extremist tobacco controllers without too much fuss? Wasn't life so much simpler back then? Now, in the blink of an eye, some bastard judge has just made their lives incredibly complicated.

What's more, interests used to be aligned. Prohibitionist tobacco controllers would scream for ever higher tax on tobacco and all parties in government - much like the tobacco control plan debate here last week - shout "hell yeah!" in support. Yes, tobacco duty is well past the Laffer Curve in most western countries, but raising it doesn't cost a great deal and it helps politicians to virtue signal whilst keeping their state-paid vermin off their backs for a little while.

But now this new thing has come along and they're in a cleft stick. They've demanded smokers quit smoking for decades, and now they are. In droves. And it's happening alarmingly quickly. So much so that government receipts from tobacco duty are starting to tank.

It also shows their coercive and bullying tobacco control policies to be utterly useless, and they spent so much time, money and effort on the legislation to get them through. Just think of all those civil service man hours completely wasted.

So now they are trying to fit current policies to new technology and finding it's like putting a square peg in a round hole. It's the same all over the world, the EU Tobacco Products Directive in 2013 regulated e-cigs despite they not containing tobacco, the FDA classes e-cigs as tobacco products because it's far less effort than actually producing a bespoke regulatory regime for them.

Is it any wonder why the laziest of countries - mostly basket case nations, banana republics and dictatorships (and NHS trust fiefdoms) - simply ban the products rather than have the hassle of changing everything they have been doing for decades?

We are living in historic times. Products have come along in an inordinately short space of time for political policies - it's almost a global revolution - and governments are at a loss what to do about it. This is as disruptive as things get.

It's easy to laugh at NZ politicians because they have kind of brought it on themselves in being lazy and complicit in adhering to the sophistry and mendacity of the tobacco control cult in the past, but you have to kinda feel sorry for them having this hot potato thrown into their lap before they can get their spin-masters to react to it and burble their way through committees to water it down.

Of course, if NZ politicians really wanted to provide a huge incentive to their smokers to quit, this graphic provided by Crampton should show them the way.

NZ is a massive draw for criminals to sell black market tobacco in their area of the world. So if they really wanted to get smokers to stop smoking - because that is what they really want to do, right? - they merely have to enthusiastically welcome e-cigs and other safer nicotine products with open arms, not tax them, and see their smoking rates plummet while simultaneously easing pressure on the cost and workload of their border agencies.

What's not to like?

Let's see which way they jump, eh? God I love watching this stuff, it's like a global zoo dedicated to observing the behaviour of disingenuous and venal politicians.

Sunday, 22 July 2018

Late on parade with this due to business pressure, but Sinclair Davidson posted a very interesting article about the WTO's ruling on plain packaging a couple of weeks ago.

Davidson has consistently argued that plain packaging has had no impact on smoking in Australia and is an utter failure, despite the desperate spin being fabricated by the government over there.

Well, lo and behold, in the WTO's 800 page reasoning behind its judgement that plain packs are not contrary to global trade rules, they seem to agree.

The WTO strangely argues that there is evidence that the decline in prevalence in Australia appears to have accelerated post plain packaging, but none of the analysis includes any discussion of the huge tax increases which coincided with and then followed its introduction. Instead the WTO focuses on the far more trivial by saying it is unclear whether bigger graphic health warnings or plain packaging were more important.

This is like saying that someone died when a bus drove over his finger without mentioning that he was picking his nose at the time. It's quite obvious that the effect of successive 12.5% rises in tobacco duty have a far more dramatic effect than fiddling with colours on the packet.

When the WTO get to the “quitting-related outcomes and other distal outcomes” though, a little bit of truth comes out (emphases mine).

a. The impact of the TPP measures and enlarged GHWs on adult cigarette smokers' quitting intention and quitting-related cognition reactions is limited and mixed.

b. The TPP measures and enlarged GHWs have had a statistically significant positive impact on avoidant behaviours, such as pack concealment, among adult cigarette smokers, while their impact on stubbing out and stopping smoking is much more limited and mixed.

c. Although the TPP measures and enlarged GHWs have statistically significantly increased calls to the Quitline, the observed impact of the TPP measures and enlarged GHWs on quit attempts is very limited and mixed.

d. The empirical evidence of the impact of the TPP measures and enlarged GHWs on adolescents' quitting-related outcomes is limited. This evidence suggests that the impact of the TPP measures and enlarged GHWs on adolescents' refraining from smoking cigarettes and thoughts about quitting is statistically not significant. No empirical evidence has been submitted to us on pack concealment among adolescent smokers.

Couple this with the Australia Bureau of Statistics data on chain volume measures of spending on Cigarettes and Tobacco showing a long-term decline in tobacco sales having been arrested since plain packaging, and you have to wonder what on earth is going on here.

Click to enlarge

And that is without even factoring in that the Australian government itself has been forced to form a new “Tobacco Taskforce” to address the issue of a whopping rise in illicit trade post-plain packs. The anti-smoking lobby rubbished the warning of an increase in illicit trade as a result of plain packs but it is reported that seizures of illicit products in the year to date have already reached 98 tonnes compared with 117 tonnes in the whole of the prior year. Either enforcement agencies are on steroids or, perhaps, there is simply far more now to catch.

As Davidson says of the WTO's admission of lack of evidence of efficacy, "that is a damning assessment because what did convince the WTO was even worse – junk science".

Quite. It seems that the World Trade Organisation, no less, was motivated to effectively endorse the confiscation of billions of pounds worth of intellectual property and branding - not just on tobacco as this now forms a precedent - despite finding that there is no valid science behind the concept of plain packaging and that it has had no beneficial effect on smoking prevalence.

They have basically sided with vague predictions - from people paid to have extraordinarily strong conflicts of interest - about what may happen in the future. On this showing, we can expect the WTO to soon issue rules on the international trading of fairies from the bottom of the garden.

It seems that everywhere you look these days there is an establishment carve-up going on. It's little wonder that people are increasingly sick and tired of the state and its self-protecting mechanisms. When even a global regulator of trade rules in favour of fraudulent bureaucracy over and above protecting legal businesses from over-reach of state institutions, armed only with ideological bullshit and fake science, we are in a parlous place.

Hitch Orwell's grave up to a dynamo, his spinning could solve our future energy problems for a century at least.

Remember that the UKCTAS is funded entirely by your taxes. And they believe a good way of spending your money - so much so that they are boasting about it - is ensuring that people watching Love Island don't see anyone smoking.

Can you think of anything more utterly pointless than that? Because I can't.

What's more, these highly-paid people sat down and watched 21 episodes of the show to count how many times someone smoked a cigarette; catalogued the brand used; and spent time on an exercise to work out how many "impressions" were created as a result. So we appear now to be paying organisations out of taxpayer funds to spend time and our resources on stopping reality shows showing reality. Seriously, this beggars belief.

I would ask UKCTAS how many people, exactly, they have stopped smoking with this brave new idea, because it hasn't even stopped the contestants. I don't know what the show is about, but - yet again - it seems tobacco control is having a harmful effect on people's lives. Here are some quotes from the show's fans.

“Am pretty livid the smoking area has been banned in #LoveIsland Thats where all the kick offs, strops, bitching and secrets come out.”

“Not seen a single person smoke yet. I miss the chain smoking and gossiping area of the villa #loveisland,”

I love the justification for this too.

The reason that the show no longer airs people smoking is that the islanders have been banned from smoking in public areas due to the barrage of complaints the show received last year.

Oh really? Well UKCTAS just claimed credit for that. Do you think that they are claiming credit for this massive upswell of outrage from concerned private citizens or - as I think is more likely - the "barrage" of complaints came from UKCTAS and their equally miserable state-funded allies?

This is the state of affairs right now, it seems. We've seen recently how health extremists - and health extremists alone - attacked adverts for chocolate by demonising the Easter Bunny and complaining to the ASA. And now we see UKTCAS boasting about how they got smoking banned in Love Island and it being passed off as some kind of public movement.

It's not. There is no public movement. Just about no-one cares about smoking in Love Island and some fans are pretty pissed off that it has lessened their enjoyment of the show.

I'm sure UKCTAS could have some use somewhere, but paying for researchers to watch TV for hours on end, before sending staff to a conference - on taxpayer funding - in order to boast farcically about how they got smoking banned on Love Island, I would suggest, is a fucking shit waste of our money.

Wednesday, 18 July 2018

A few months ago I met with a city analyst who read your humble host's offerings and was keen to meet. We enjoyed a liquid lunch in Threadneedle Street but before going our separate ways, he asked if I could put him in contact with Grandad, of Head Rambles fame, as he was a regular visitor to Ireland.

It would appear that they did, indeed, get in touch and the link-up has produced something very useful. Today Grandad explains on his blog how this new project came into being. The result is a glorious website - based on an extensive investor report - which delves into the murky dealings of the tobacco control industry over decades.

Entitled "Smoking - On Ethics" the site calmly runs through the grubby and disingenuous past of tobacco control, and explains how their industry of grifters, charlatans and snake oil salesmen has hoodwinked and conned the public for decades over tobacco. Moreover, it tells the whole story right up to the present day and the continuing misinformation and garbage that is being touted by the global tobacco control cult towards e-cigs, snus and other safer products.

It is impeccably put together by Grandad with easily-navigable links throughout, and the text is straightforward, expertly-written and very readable. It is a great resource for myth-busting the hysterical tone of anti-smoking lunacy we see today, and how it has developed over the years while the public has mostly been oblivious to the chicanery, neatly encapsulated in this short para from the section on harm reduction.

It appears that some in Public Health have adopted an approach which dismisses science which is unhelpful to them and will attack opponents as being paid stooges. It begs the question as to whether this is a new approach, or actually one that is now simply out in the open.

Indeed.

I can heartily recommend the site, I think you will enjoy it. So pour yourself a beverage or two of your choosing, go read here and enjoy.

Thursday, 12 July 2018

Via new vaping media source Vapetrotter (which you should bookmark, by the way), it won't surprise you to learn that a vast impenetrable bureaucracy which lives solely on the basis of tens of thousands of employees earning their living by doing nothing but regulating, wants to regulate e-cigs further than the absolute shit-shower they did with the TPD.

The EU seems to have decided it wants to tax e-cigarettes. They don't have any moral or scientifc basis for doing so, but hey, salaries have to be paid and vaping is killing the treasuries of many an EU country.

They have published a consultation and - whether you vape or not - please respond to it and tell them (nicely) that they are taking the right royal piss.

There is also a petition organised by the Collective of EU Vaper Associations which is quite cool and and has been translated into a number of different languages. It's up to about 18,000 so far so do consider supporting that too.

Oh, and remember, as you can see from this, the state is not - and never will be - your friend.

Cadbury, Chewits and Squashies sweets have become the first companies to have online adverts banned under new rules targeting junk food ads for children.

The Advertising Standards Authority said the companies did not do enough to prevent under-16s seeing the content.

Now, if you were around in the 80s or 90s, did you ever think we would be in a position where kids are not allowed to see adverts for things that they like to eat, and have for decades? All based on a fantasy panic whipped up by repulsive self-enriching tax thieves?

The Easter Bunny cannot be used to market chocolate to children, the ASA has ruled after finding against Cadbury.

The chocolate company marketed a storybook, featuring eggs and the Easter Bunny, on its website, which broke the rules against promoting food that is high in fat, salt or sugar to children under the age of 16.

Cadbury was banned from marketing The Tale Of The Great Easter Bunny, written by pop singer Frankie Bridge, on its website, after the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), decided it was aimed at children.

The Easter Bunny? This is a character that parents have thrilled their young kids with for hundreds of years, but in the new joyless, grey, miserable world that 'public health' have planned for us, this is now illegal.

The hold that 'public health' has over politicians is astonishing, but then it's because politicians are weak, cowardly, and ultimately incredibly stupid, as I have mentioned before.

Chocolate Oranges are one of life's little treats. The overwhelming majority of the public like them. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't like chocolate.

Yet here we are with two leading politicians arrogantly competing to be the one who appears toughest on making that treat more difficult to enjoy. This isn't a mind-altering drug we're talking about here - legal or otherwise - merely a fucking Chocolate Orange!

But back to today. The trouser-stuffing tax spongers were elated, of course.

Obesity Health Alliance lead Caroline Cerny said: "Whilst today's rulings should be celebrated, the complaints demonstrate the blatant ways in which the food and drink industry attempts to exploit loopholes in the rules."

They are 'celebrating' another little bit of joy being eradicated from children's' lives just so they can keep their snouts in the trough. There is little more vile than that.

And who, pray, was it who complained anyway? What disgusting type of person is so miserable as to be driven to complain about something kids like? Well, fortunately, the rulings are on the ASA website. Here is the one ruling against Cadbury.

The Obesity Health Alliance challenged whether the ads were for products that were high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS product ads) that were directed at children.

In other words, no-one at all cared about the ad except the Obesity Health Alliance themselves, a collection of mostly state-funded organisations who would be out of work if they didn't continually promote scares to keep their funding stream.

The Children’s Food Campaign (Sustain) challenged whether the Squashies World advergame was an ad for products that were high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS products) that was directed at children.

In each case, there was only one complainant, and it was from people who fabricated the moral panic in the first place and took government money to lobby the government to come up with rules to take as much joy out of children's lives as possible.

It is surely about time politicians woke up and realised the destruction these self-centred bastards are doing to society. They are draining the joy out of kids lives for financial gain and are entirely unrepresentative of public opinion.

Where is this bonfire of the quangoes we were promised? It's the least that should happen because some of these obnoxious parasites deserve to burn for eternity.